• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2025

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  • You actually WANT to be with low free memory. Provided that most of it is used by cache.

    Free memory is a waste, when you could cache stuff for faster access.

    That’s how Linux memory management works, and it make sense if you relflect on it. Better cache that page or that file that is used often, since free memory is just wasted. Cache can be freed and memory reclaimed in a fraction of a millisecond when needed.

    So don’t bother too much. Unless your SWAP usage is high, don’t bother.

    Also consider that Linux kernel will use your swap a bit even if you have lots of cache, because the kernel knows better than you how to improve your performances. Swapping out never used stuff is better than killing cached items.

    Again, don’t oberthink memory on Linux, the best alarm is when swap is constantly happening, then yes you need more ram (or to kill that broken process that keeps hogging due to a bug)


  • My recent experience regarding questions on documentation:

    • dovecot: shitty useless responses, totally made up
    • Gentoo linux: to be checked twice and mostly wrong or fake
    • godot: accurate and correct almost always, maybe examples not always 100% correct
    • C++ standard 17: correct, never had a wrong reply from llm, also the exact ples where on point and correct

    I think that’s all what I have used it for in the last six months.

    Note: I used only Google search AI llm, nothing else.

    So it seems that depends on what you ask.



  • While you are correct, as all tools AI is not bad per se.

    If you use ai to replace more lengthy documentation searches and write your own code that works out pretty well and speed up your work without degrading your coding. Granted, I got plainly incorrect answers as well, but at least I managed to be much more efficient.

    Treat LLMs/ai as a glorified documentation aggregator and that’s how you correctly use that tool.

    Like, use a knife to cut and cook meat, not to cut another person body, and that’s how you correctly use that tool too.


  • I run a setup very similar for many years. Upgraded progressively from 2x120GB to 4x4Tb, from mechanicals to sdds.

    I can say don’t cheap out on the usb enclosures, the more you pay the better it is. I purchased a 4 bay JBOD usb3 box with a fan (150€+ nowadays) and that is the only enclosure that really worked out and still works (but retired) today. All single disk enclosures will fail sooner or later depending on how cheap they are, just take that onto consideration.

    The setup itself is pretty good and stable, I would suggest standard Linux MDRaid 1, and on top of that something simple like ext4. I wouldn’t put anything that adds to the disk workloads like zfs, but maybe I am wrong.

    Speed wise, I was able to stream movies without any hiccups, and that’s plenty I think.

    Do not cheap out on the enclosures. Cheap ones will last 1 month, I don’t kid you.

    And keep them cool… Fan… Air circulation… USB controllers will be killed faster than mechanical disks by heat. And 24/7 will generate heat… Those enclosures are not built for that…

    Again, it’s pretty doable and I did it for almost 2 decades. DONT BE CHEAP ON ENCLOSURES (did I say so already?) And you should be fine.









  • Plasma and Gentoo user here.

    The transition has been so uneventful and simple that I didn’t even noticed. I run some 15 desktops with different mixed hardware setups and use VNC / RDP sometimes too.

    One day I started noticing on some desktops Wayland was now in use, by chance. Then I started taking notice.

    I can say the ones moved to Wayland are smoother, but might be aneddotical. Beside that, cannot care less about X11 or Wayland, they both work just fine for all my use cases.

    For the sake of future, welcome Wayland!

    /smallrant Sorry for X11, have to say I have been in the business since kernel version 2 and I DO NOT miss losing X11, its a bunch of half assed half baked spaghetti tech that has done its own time and would not have kept up with life. /rantover.